A large number of Microsoft customers are in for a rude awakening on 8 April 2014.
With less than 400 days to go, 15 per cent of those running Windows XP are still unaware that that’s the date Microsoft finally turns off all support for its legacy PC operating system, according to a recent survey.
After 8 April next year, …

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If the PCs running XP do not have access the the internet then i see no problem having them running past the end of life. A P4 box with 512mb RAM is quite capable of running XP and office software but to upgrade them to Win 7 or 8 they would need to have the RAM upgrade and maybe hard drives so it becomes more of an expense than just the OS license

Windows XP is the hackers port of call in terms of trying to get a foot hold and establish botnets,

Yeah, sure. That's what they said about Windows 2000 and it's still a solid operating system.

Look, my brother's laptop has Windows XP SP3 and he hasn't installed a patch in five years. He uses Outpost firewall and a good anti-virus and has never had a problem.

Look, to me anyone who chooses hyperbole to call XP a "hackers port of call" is a bit suspect to me. And if that same person recommends Windows 8 over Windows 7, well, I'm wondering if that person has an agenda.

"If the PCs running XP do not have access the the internet then i see no problem having them running past the end of life. A P4 box with 512mb RAM is quite capable of running XP and office software ..."

And how are those office files getting on and off the machine? USB drives? Floppies? A surface of attack (not matter how small or odd) is still a possible problem.

I see your point and generally agree with you. I'm sure there will be a lot of Win XP machines at the back of warehouses and connected to small production lines that will happily carry on as normal. However, over time they tend to get forgotten about and can become the "Typhoid Mary" of your office.

As much as I hate the upgrade treadmill it's worth looking at what's going to happen to them over the next year.

And how are those office files getting on and off the machine? USB drives? Floppies? A surface of attack (not matter how small or odd) is still a possible problem.

Most of which can be defended against by a decent anti-virus/anti-malware program, kept up to date.

Now quite how long those will be maintained and supported is a supplimentary (but also important) question, as of course is customers having enough IS savvy to maintain them without access to the internet for standard self-updating.

'Kiosk' devices

Judging by the number of blue-screens I've noticed in airports, there are quite a lot of installations of WinXP or earlier running on unattended devices for the purposes of running advertising or customer information boards. I don't see these getting updated in a hurry ...

Agenda??? HOW DARE YOU!

"if the PC running XP ..."

"And how are those office files getting on and off the machine? USB drives? Floppies? A surface of attack (not matter how small or odd) is still a possible problem."

This surface of attack is the same for ALL versions of Windows - there is practically nothing in Win8 that makes it any less vulnerable to such attacks other than it will have security and bug fix support for a few years beyond that remaining for XP.

Not to mention

there is plenty of hardware out there that runs XP quite well that won't run Win 7 and 8 at all. I'm not just talking about the really old stuff like the 2004 Sempron nettop I use at the shop (which will be staying on XP as while it has 2GB of RAM and does its job just fine with AV and firewall neither the video nor the sound is supported in any OS other than XP) but I've seen plenty of Pentium Ds and early Athlon X2s that won't run Win 7, sure as hell won't run win 8, because nobody bothered to make compatible drivers. On one Pentium D I tried upgrading to Win 8 I found there was no sound, ethernet, or onboard graphics drivers to be had. You would have to throw out a system that frankly is overkill for the kinds of roles that particular customer has, all so MSFT can push their cellphone UI? No thanks.

XP will be hanging around long past 2014, with so many Pentium 4s, Pentium Ds, and Athlons and X2s out there that still run great I have a feeling its gonna have a loooong tail. And I don't see how then will be different than now with regards to hackers, not like MSFT releases out of schedule patches hardly ever and as long as you have moved away from IE (since MSFT doesn't backport their browser) so that the browser gets patches? I don't see what the problem is. Heck there are still browsers out there that support Win98 (Kmeleon) so I doubt XP support will be going away anytime soon.

WRONG

There is a point to getting Win 7 over 8, the point being that if you don't have a touchscreen Win 8 is a mess. for example try win 8 on a laptop and see how often the stupid thing will get confused and decide one minute you are moving the cursor, the next swiping...because we all have to run smartphones now and those use swipes don't ya know?

I'm sorry but after fighting that stupid thing for nearly 2 months Win 8 is the first MSFT OS since WinME I will NOT allow in my shop. Not that its gonna matter anyway as from the looks of it "Windows Blue" will be released in 2014 so like Vista Win 8 is gonna be a "here today, gone later today" release, ala the Star Trek rule.

"That's what they said about Windows 2000 and it's still a solid operating system"

Yeah, no, it isn't.

XP has a broken SSL stack which will mean very shortly the internet will stop working for you. Windows 2000 I don't even know wtf is going on there. That's ignoring the endless list of sploits that outpost won't ever save you from.

Can't teach some people.

There's no open source products that would even consider supporting code that old, why Microsoft feels it needs to baby dumbness is anybody's guess.

Re: Not to mention embedded systems such as laboratory instruments

These devices were interfaced to now ancient PC's running Windows XP. They're not connected to the Internet. They've rarely been updated. Yet, especially in US Govt. facilities, there are various moves a foot to control, license or upgrade them: except many times the instrument manufacturer hasn't! So these will continue to run XP as long as the hardware "breathes" regardless of MicroSoft, Govvey IT "specialists", managers, or Generals.

Re: Really?

Re: Really?

"I doubt that'd be a popular move with anyone involved."

Indeed not. And from a tech point of view it would be madness for any business to touch Windows 8 with Blue only months away, which can be relied upon to upset somebody, somewhere (if not everybody, everywhere).

Re: Really?

Re: Really?

I am an OAP, and a volunteer helping teach other OAPs computing - So far all of them hate Windows 8 - Except, maybe, those few who only seem to want internet access (so we might as well get them using iOS)...

Re: Really?

They really tried pushing my doctor to switch his office to win 8, she and her nurses are all older, know what they did after trying Win 8 for a month? They went to iPads with keyboards and new charting software installed. When I asked her about it she said "I don't have to fight this like I did that other mess" and that was that.

I have a feeling Win 8 is gonna come back to haunt them, as XP users are frankly just as well off going Apple or Google since they'll have to learn a whole new UI whichever way they go.

Paris because I doubt even she would be stupid enough to run off her fans like that.

"you might as well go all in and go Windows 8 rather than Windows 7"

Re: "you might as well go all in and go Windows 8 rather than Windows 7"

Which, if Windows 8's pre-release behaviour from Microsoft is any indication, they don't. It is like they were in a car with the brakes cut, and had thousands of passengers yelling at them that the brakes are cut and they just stepped right on the accelerator and went forward with their ears plugged and humming.

Re: "you might as well go all in and go Windows 8 rather than Windows 7"

>The new Win 8 UI is all about MS attempting to get back into the profitable mobile game.

Which MS decided to effectively exit when it decided to combine it's various client OS developments into a single release with all of the politic's, design, development and management problems that entails which have resulted in a greatly extending development. Whereas Apple iOS and Google's Android both created a new mobile OS derived from their respective parent OS'es, which enabled them to focus on the mobile user environment and rapidly innovate relevant features.

As the article indicates, MS haven't been particularly pro-active in setting out the roadmap for their enterprise customers. Remember in the 90's MS effectively had two Window's development streams with 98 & ME being consumer releases which business largely ignored and used 95 until 2000 was released. XP suffered initially as MS brought the two code-bases back into line and so wasn't really a stable enterprise OS until SP2.

As you point out, the question is whether MS's strategy for a unified UI will win long term, or whether they will continue to loose ground to the more agile pure-play OS's. Also in question is whether they can gain sufficient traction for their subscription-based licensing model.

Eh, suck it up and move to 7. Which is essentially Vista service pack 4 now. XP was a nightmare when it first rolled out. You pretty much needed a whole new kit to run it and even then the drivers weren't there. Still, it became solid. Can't see moving to 8 any time soon until it is fixed. Good core, but it is very ugly.

Seriously though

*Please* stop saying that you'll be "naked" after April 4 when Microsoft stops updates for WindowsXP. A claim like that is simply hyperbole.

We are "naked" NOW. Security patches for any OS occurs *after* the threat has been examined and determined, after the fact of threat release into the wild. Everyone, everywhere, surfs naked NOW and uses various forms of prevention to avoid infection. The only thing Microsoft, or Apple for that matter, technically does is either immunize or cure you AFTER the threat is real. All of this acts in a similar fashion to biological diseases except there is no built-in systemic immunity; it is added artificially to the system in response to the detection of a threat.

As a user, your actions will not change a single bit once Microsoft stops its updates. It will still be up to you to use preventative measures to avoid infections, only the source of a cure will change. Microsoft simply patches their systems to strengthen the measures you are taking yourself (anti-virus, firewalls, proxies, script controls, ad blockers and hopefully some common sense). WindowsXP sip not up and die on April 4, you will be as "naked" as before as your computer interacts with the world, that will not change much.

Wooh there. Many security patches on many OS's are actually privately reported or internally discovered. Not all are "Zero Day" exploits being used in the wild, THAT is hyperbole.

And to say that people will not be any more or any less vulnerable once security patches stop is just encouraging bad practice. Many of the "Major" virus infections of the last 15 or so years relied on security flaws that HAD been patched!

nicely put

You said it in the best possible way .. That's exactly the thing all these article writers and nay-sayers and doomsday predictors of the end of windows xp don't seem to get ..

People will be reluctant and loathe to migrate to a new OS as long as the current one still does its job quite well .. However, decreased support after 2014 april will gradually be followed by other software vendors esp. Browser and anti-malware software makers .. This, coupled with a new range of hardware devices like printers and so on with a new breed of interfaces and drivers may be the reason people will eventually shift to windoze 7 or 8 .. (a bit similar to how it happened from win98 to winxp )

"Many security patches on many OS's are actually privately reported or internally discovered."

And what part of this discovery process occurs on a system that isn't "in the wild" - that is, already vulnerable because people are using it, unpatched, on the internet as the exploit is being reported?

Again, you are surfing "naked" NOW. All systems are vulnerable and the vulnerabilities get patched AFTER the OS rolls out, after the public is using it with all its existing holes and targets. The patches only try to plug some of the leaks in the sieve, after you have already been pouring the water of the internet in for, likely, months and months and months.

The realization and you are already "naked" is part of your cure - rampant paranoid is your only hope of internet survival. From personal information to data integrity, only the paranoid survive.

Re: Windows XP Upgrade

Re: Windows XP Upgrade

@Naughtyhorse

"well they'll be getting an OS that's supported by the manufacturer for a start!"

As an independent contractor whose done a lot of work for Fortune 500's and SMB's in recent years, I can tell you I haven't felt any support from MS for SMB's since the 1990's! For example, on several occasions patchy MS patching broke more things than it fixed.

Sometimes the patches themselves, or the delivery mechanism therein, or the added complexity of Virus / Malware software, conspire to bring about unexpected crashes or disable crucial features. In 2007 XP was updated with new common controls among other files. Several of these had update bugs and caused catastrophic failures in businesses I worked in.

Office 2003 is on this expiry list too. Several updates in 2007 disabled or deactivated features. Whether MS did this cynically to create headaches for Office 2003 and move more 2007 product I'll forgo speculating! In any event, I couldn't get any help from MS on either issue. In the end, Sysinternals Process Monitor and the Depends.exe app came to the rescue thankfully-- not Microsoft!

Re: Windows XP Upgrade

Faster? I could buy a faster car... doesn't mean I have to or want to.

Faster to support? What, Win7 staff pick up their phones quicker? Hmmm... XP remains, for obvious reasons, the one that people have a decade experience of.

There will come a time (and Microsoft will make sure of it, because their existence depends on it) when new software won't run on it, when it won't run on new hardware, and the upgrade to MS-Win-Whatever will be forced.

Until then... Use it until it croaks and dies.

Remember the typewriter days. Can I have a new typewriter? No: not while the old one still works. A bit more of that attitude applied to PCs and software would save a huge amount of money, and put a spoke in the wheel of MS's gravy train. Why the hell should MS take for granted that the commercial world will shower it in regular doses of dosh! For nothing. Lets show them otherwise!

Re: Windows XP Upgrade

Started a new job last year and we are still running Windows XP. "We have dabbled with Windows 7" came the response, when asked what the plan was for migrating.

One legacy app was holding them back from going to Windows 7, which after two days of working on I found a way to get it working on Windows 7.

A little bit of work on WDS, USMT and Powershell and we now have a light-touch deployment of Windows 7 that works on almost all 15 models of desktop PC that we have in the office.

Doing a desktop rollout, be it hardware or software, is one the least "Sexy" IT projects and the hardest to sell to management, you almost always get the same response "Why do we need to spend money on doing that, what we have works fine!"

You mention "user resistance", but lets not forget that many of these "users" are the managers that oversee IT departments budgets!